Shale Gas News and Information

DISH Texas no shale diaster either

2012-05-18T08:56:22+01:00

I had a visit to DISH Texas near Fort Worth pencilled in recently in but ended up visiting a frac job a few miles to the south west in Parker County. DISH, the city formerly called Clark, must now be officially referred to as all capitals DISH.

In exchange for renaming the town, all residents of the town have received free basic television service for ten years and a free DVR from Dish Network. There was no formal opposition to renaming Clark; twelve citizens attended the council meeting to support the measure.

Obviously a town of serious people, even if there are only 225 of them.That detail alone is often overlooked and DISH is conflated in the European fractivist mind as being symptomatic of an entire city choking from widespread pollution. So the next time you hear about the poisoned city in Texas, look out the window. Most people in Europe would see homes of 225 people. But, who needs reality, it's all about perception: thanks to Gasland, DISH plays the shale Fukushima to Dimock's Chernobyl in the eyes of the antis.

This week,US National Public Radio did a series on the medical impacts of shale. It would be very hard for even the most paranoid shale anti to dismiss the reports from NPR as being biased, just as US/UK right wing BBC haters dismiss NPR as Radio Moscow. That makes the NPR report that much more significant:

Josh Fox goes Hollywood

2012-05-17T11:09:11+01:00

Not content with making outrageous assertions about the East Coast, Josh Fox is bringing his campaign against fracking to California. I'm a NY/LON kind of guy, but I admit to a weakness towards Southern California. I wouldn't live there in a million years, but it's a great place to visit. It does have some strange history, not bad for place younger than my house. If you go to the old movies of hundred years ago, the Keystone Kops were doing those crazy stunts in the urban setting of a Los Angeles packed with oil wells. California was at one time just as big as Texas or Alaska in oil production, which of course means that the oil industry has been happy fracking away with no one any wiser for fifty years. This is snapshot of oil production in Los Angeles County alone:

Europe dithers, China delivers

2012-05-17T08:45:46+01:00

The slow, ultra-precautionary approach to shale is just as much, if not even more, a UK than a European issue. I've worked with people in all types of private and public organisations and the private ones often are the most conservative of all. I've always said, and I know it's pissed people off but that is the point, that Nike could never in a million years be an English company. Just Do It, is the exact oppposite mantra of how UK businesses are run. UK businesses have analyis paralysis combined with a fervent desire to be wrong in a group than right by themselves.

South Africa's shale moratorium going south

2012-05-16T08:44:56+01:00

The white millionaire fracking opponents of South Africa's Treasure the Karoo have always seemed the unlikeliest of bedfellows with the Frack Offs of the world.They finance Irish anti groups for example.One can't stop thinking that a major issue of fracking worrying Treasure the Karoo is not water or chemicals but black people empowered with real jobs as opposed to subsistence agriculture or grazing.

The Karoo group is well funded and there has been talk of them creating a world alliance of fractitivists. One can go to any anti page worldwide and find South Africa's moratorium featured prominently and approvingly as example for the world to follow.

Luckily the resources of South Africa belong to all South Africans and the apartheid nostalgia fractivists of South Africa are going to be only a bizarre footnote to the fracking debate.

The Energy Ministry came out with all guns firing for hydraulic fracturing – referred to cautiously as the “f-word” on Tuesday – as it could help turn around Africa’s energy fortunes, reduce dependence on dirty fuels like coal and create masses of jobs in the Karoo.

Cuadrilla's numbers in detail

2012-05-15T11:44:51+01:00

Thanks for this to the keen eyed monomaniacs at Gas Drilling in Balcombe who publicised an AJ Lucas presentation that concentrated on their 42% holding of Cuadrilla Resources.AJ Lucas as a public company need to publicly reveal what a private company need not.

The Balcombe antis have always known where the true dangers lie. Why concentrate on millions of barrels of oil when a couple of extra trucks might come through the village? Similarly, the new scare headline for Thursday's Guardian:

Cuadrilla plan to inject the equivalent of nearly 80,000 bottles of Bonnymans Patio Cleaner underneath Balcombe village

That's their take and this one is mine.

Realism from the UK Energy Secretary

2012-05-14T08:30:08+01:00

One of the uncomfortable questions I've been asking UK energy policy makers concerns the issue of renewable targets. The Conventional Wisdom has been that the EU has mandated that a proportion of generation be from renewables. The CW seem to have forgotten that the logic of renewables is not to create a renewable industry, but to actually reduce carbon. That is the whole point of using natural gas to replace coal: It will exceed actual carbon reduction targets for the next two decades. Luckily, Ed Davey the new DECC Secretary now realisesit isn't how we reduce carbon that matters, it is whether we do it at all.

Europe should focus on cutting carbon emissions, rather than just repeating an existing range of EU green policy targets that expire at the end of the decade, Britain's energy and climate chief said on Monday.

US Shale's Really Big Problem

2012-05-13T09:58:43+01:00

According to the opponents and road blockers of European shale gas, shale in the United States has lots of problems. Apart from telling us how widespread the problems are, they never seem to actually be able to come up with any proof. Everything is hearsay at best and as intellectually rigourous as quoting the Huffington Post (!) as this alleged study of the problems facing Ireland shale gas had the cheek to do. Shoddy and outdated research combines with a total inability to see big picture issues. But that is the point of UK shale in particular. The obssession with tiny nit picking details from some sources folds in with an absolute refusal to face shale reality.

But I can report an obvious problem of US natural gas that was the number one topic of concern in Texas recently.It's ironic that this is the issue very rarely mentioned in Europe. This is the true "controversy" of shale gas that is never mentioned because people simply cannot envisage that such a problem could develop. Strange how people are happy to obsess about the imperceptible or the inconsequential but refuse to discuss the elephant in the room of North American shale gas:

There is so much gas that one cannot even begin to explain how much there is. It is increasingly clear that the massive gaps developing between supply and demand could destabilise even world gas markets. Let's look first at this slide from the US Energy Information Administration. These are interesting in they show the impact of shale only in the modern era:

The new Dimock water reality

2012-05-11T20:41:59+01:00

Two weeks ago I was in Dimock Pennsylvania and saw the houses of those wanted to make Cabot pay as the signs on their houses said, referring to Cabot Petroleum.

I decided then with a combination of European cynicism and my NYC bullshitometer, that this had a lot to do with money and zero to do with water. I particularly liked the the mega mansion being built (with gas royalties) on the same land that one land owner said Cabot had poisoned. Proof today, yet again on what that well known spawn of Dick Cheney says for the FOURTH time.That's right, but contrary to paranoid assertion, it is actually Barack Obama's EPA that discovers:

Federal environmental regulators say testing of scores of drinking-water wells in a northeastern Pennsylvania village has failed to show unsafe levels of contamination, a blow to residents who assert a gas driller tainted their water supply with hazardous chemicals nearly four years ago.